I had come from Kansas City, where segregation was just–you lived it, breathed it every day. But I had worked in these environments where I was the only Black employed…so, you know, I wasn’t afraid…going to a segregated school we were taught, ‘Stand up for your rights’…
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Rita Dolores White came to Los Angeles in 1955, very much a part of the Great Migration. While historians often mark two general waves of the Migration – coinciding with the World Wars – like the rest of history, it’s not quite that neat and tidy.
Listening to her oral history interview, it is clear that Walters was an activist from jump. This is one of the many invaluable aspects of an oral history, the way we get to see the evolution of a life. Much like history itself, each personal action is spurred on by a previous event. Some of us, since quite young, have felt some kind of way when witnessing inequities. And some of us did something in response to that witnessing. Ms. Rita was doing that something from a young age.
She mentions, in her interview, that her grandparents were activists in their own right. (Please imagine, being a Black activist circa turn of the 20th century and what those folks might have faced in being so). Activism ran in the family:
My father’s first cousin left Kansas City…He came out here as a young man and started a newspaper, The Los Angeles Sentinel, and it was in the 1930s where he started this campaign, ‘Don’t buy where you can’t work… so the papers had information and pictures about Leon’s campaign on Central Avenue, to not buy, because that was the heart of the Black community in those days, and they had all kinds of stores up and down there, and didn’t have a Black person working in any of them.”
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
I subscribe to the Sentinel today. The importance of the Black newspaper in American History cannot be overestimated. Note my past blog on Charlotta Bass and the Eagle, for example.
Rita Dolores White was born in 1930. At the time of her move to Los Angeles, she was living with her parents in Kansas City. Her father was a Pullman porter, a career that has its own important history in our country. Rita had been ready to leave Kansas for some time:
There in Kansas City, and perhaps the whole Midwest, anybody who knew anybody in California, they’d come back with all these stories about California is this and California is that, it was the land of milk and honey, you know. The weather was gorgeous, jobs were plentiful, you could live where you wanted to, up to a point.”
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Rita’s first job in LA was for the probation department. She was told they didn’t want “Negroes,” but she got the job anyway because she was willing to work on Sundays. As a seventh Day Adventist, her worship took place on Saturdays.
Life went on. (Remember, this is the short version!) and Rita married and had her first child. Her husband’s job then took them to Orange County, a place Rita never really felt was home:
We moved out there in February ’58, and this guy had had his house bombed. And people, you know, a lot of these people had bought homes on the G.I. Bill, and they didn’t want to live in the tract with Black folks…so they walked away from the houses, and here was this… we bought the house from the VA…Then the state came along and decided they would build a freeway through part of it. The 57 Freeway… And so once the state bought the land they wanted, then they started renting the homes, and Black folks and Mexicans moved in, and there were a few white folks, but not many.
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Mrs. Walters expands on this later in the interview:
But we could not buy a house under the G.I. Bill. When they did allow Blacks to utilize the G.I. Bill here in California, it was for older inner-city property only, not for the newer subdivisions.
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Not everything is for everybody.
Much to Walters’ relief, her family moved back to Los Angeles after a time. But it was not necessarily a cinch to do so. While California had a reputation as a relatively racially equal state, there were all sorts of racist property and business owners who had no interest in perpetuating that reputation. As so many have testified, including in the oral histories I have taken myself, securing a place to live was not always easy for an African American.
It was around 1957 when they returned to LA looking for a place to house their growing family:
We had people right here in town turn us down, tell us, ‘No, you can’t buy a house here in this neighborhood.’ One place it happened was… a perfect little house, and it was our price range, and the guy, the owner was there, you know, “for sale by owner” sign sitting out there. We went there and he was very nice. He said, ‘Oh, I promised my neighbors that I wouldn’t sell to Blacks.”
[And] Leimert Park was then opening up to Blacks, but there was a neighborhood association that was trying to keep it from being a run on Blacks. The real-estate folks, you know, would go in and scare folks to death that the Blacks are coming. So they formed an organization, and they had these signs out on their lawns, ‘This home is not for sale to anyone of any color.’
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Our country’s history, I will repeat, is predicated on land ownership.
Walters lived with a fire under her. And there was so much fuel for those flames. It was the time of the Civil Rights Movement, the bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins. And then Dr. King came to Los Angeles, drawing a crowd of 20,000 she estimates, at Wrigley Field.
At this point Walters is already active with her PTA and coming up against the school board on a regular basis.
Oh, my word, yes. I tell folks, the best preparation for public office is PTA service.
UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research
Walters started working – and sometimes disagreeing – with the NAACP. And so it went, as she discovered that her avenue for changemaking lay in the participation of local politics. Very fast-forwarding, Rita Walters eventually joined the Los Angeles Board of Education in 1979, in response to years of wrestling with various schools about numerous issues — especially concerning her son with special needs. And then, seeing just how much needed changing, she ran for city council. In 1991 became the first Black woman to sit on the Los Angeles city council.
And this here is a short bit of her very long story. Often when we read about “firsts,” the narrative provided is flat and on the surface. But perhaps we’d like to know, who is this person who became a first? And I always wonder, why did it take as long as it did?
Walters died at the age of 89 in the year 2020. Just as with so many other African-American women of her time, Rita Walters changed Los Angeles. To understand LA we must understand these underpublicized lives that make it what it is today.